I would not dare to summarize Fussell’s guide here, but it shattered my illusion that I mostly avoid thinking about class signals, and instead convinced me that pretty much everything I do from waking up in the morning to going to bed at night is a class signal.
This is a very readable and interesting guide, and it may have been dead-on accurate in 1983 when it was written. But the kind of class system he describes, one defined by social signals and not by (say) brute force or even money, can only exist in a unified culture, in which everybody speaks the same “language” of signals. To use the example from the gude, Mr. Blue [collar] and Mr. White [collar], who make about the same income, both have to acknowledge on some level that Mr. White socially outranks Mr. Blue. Furthermore, Mr. Blue and Mr. White both would both have agreed that the Rockefellers, Pews, DuPonts, Mellons, Fords, and Vanderbilts constituted the top out-of-sight class.
I’d guess that America today has a much more fragmented class system now than it did when Fussel wrote, at least in some ways.
ETA:
it may have been dead-on accurate in 1983 when it was written...
On second thought, the 60′s counterculture had already undermined at a lot of the old WASP culture he describes, replacing it with—sure enough—a counterculture.
This is a very readable and interesting guide, and it may have been dead-on accurate in 1983 when it was written. But the kind of class system he describes, one defined by social signals and not by (say) brute force or even money, can only exist in a unified culture, in which everybody speaks the same “language” of signals. To use the example from the gude, Mr. Blue [collar] and Mr. White [collar], who make about the same income, both have to acknowledge on some level that Mr. White socially outranks Mr. Blue. Furthermore, Mr. Blue and Mr. White both would both have agreed that the Rockefellers, Pews, DuPonts, Mellons, Fords, and Vanderbilts constituted the top out-of-sight class.
I’d guess that America today has a much more fragmented class system now than it did when Fussel wrote, at least in some ways.
ETA:
On second thought, the 60′s counterculture had already undermined at a lot of the old WASP culture he describes, replacing it with—sure enough—a counterculture.